


Terms of Service

by ThrillingDetectiveTales



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - Politics, M/M, Some Dialogue Not for Sensitive Readers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 14:21:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20658659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales
Summary: The day after winning the Senate primary—thereby securing his position on the general election ballot, which is no small feat for a first-time candidate who’s barely old enough to run in the first place—Nate Fick wakes up to roughly six hundred unanswered social media message notifications, a splitting headache, and a text from his campaign manager that simply reads:Call me.





	Terms of Service

**Author's Note:**

> this is about the actor guys not the guy guys.
> 
> written for the prompt: "Nate has a political career. How does Ray mess it up/fit right in?" on the Loose Lips Sinks Ships meme.
> 
> contains the usual amount of Ray Person vulgarity. not beta-read. original characters aren't really based on extant persons. similarities to real people are probably just a coincidence.

The day after winning the Senate primary—thereby securing his position on the general election ballot, which is no small feat for a first-time candidate who’s barely old enough to run in the first place—Nate Fick wakes up to roughly six hundred unanswered social media message notifications, a splitting headache, and a text from his campaign manager that simply reads:

_ Call me. _

Of the three, the latter is most alarming by far. Tisha can pack a tremendous amount of disapproval into those two relatively innocuous words and Nate feels the weight of her judgment radiating in bitter waves off his cellphone.

He can’t remember what he did last night and has no idea how he might have courted Tisha’s scorn. The social media notifications alone are a solid confirmation that he made a fairly egregious misstep, even if he isn’t quite sure what that might have been. He doesn’t really want to know but is resigned to the fact that he will almost certainly be informed of his transgressions anyway—likely by Tisha herself, at excessively detailed length and with a hearty side-helping of derision to really highlight just how badly Nate fucked up.

That is, he considers darkly, if the talking heads on the morning news don’t publicly condemn him first, which—he risks a glance at the digital clock on the side table. Just past ten o’clock? Yeah, they almost definitely already have. He groans and pushes himself up onto his elbows, squinting at the room around him.

It’s a nondescript hotel suite, nicer than your standard fare but nothing that Nate hasn’t spent more than enough nights wishing he could trade for the familiar comforts of home as he checked into every new stop along the campaign trail so far. There’s a chair knocked on its side a little way past the entry alcove that belongs to the desk against the wall, if the matching dark-stained wood frames are any indication, and the bed, when Nate summons the willpower to turn his head and look at it, is in similar disarray. The mattress is slightly askew and the only remaining pillows are the one that Nate has folded in half and wedged under his head and the one he has tucked under his arm like a teddy bear. The sheet has been kicked off onto the floor with only a sad, determined corner still wrapped around Nate’s ankle and the duvet is nowhere to be seen.

He cautiously rolls over onto his back, and while the room tilts with him he doesn’t immediately choke to death on his own vomit so he marks it down as a victory. He drops his arm over his eyes with a sigh, blocking out the gauzy sunlight filtering through the totally inadequate white linen curtains, and stretches.

His hips ache, as do his shoulders, and there’s a tender, stinging line down either side of his back that feel strangely familiar, though Nate’s pulse is pounding far too loudly in his temples for him to concentrate enough to place any of it. As he lies there with his head swimming and his gut churning, his entire body throbbing like it went ten rounds with a man made of concrete, he doesn’t manage to summon even an inkling of how he ended up in this state but Nate knows, he _ knows _, that Ray Person was somehow involved. This kind of chaos only ever finds Nate when Ray is there to act as a lightning rod, which was why he had made the executive decision not to invite him along on the last leg of the cross-country Senatorial candidacy road trip.

Nate fumbles for his phone where it’s lying on the mattress and squints blearily from under the protective curve of his elbow to peer at the screen. The little battery in the top corner is hovering at a paltry eleven percent power, but that’s more than enough to ring Ray up and bawl him out. Nate thumbs into his recent text threads, pulls up Ray’s name, and then lets his arm fall back down over his face while he presses the phone to his ear and waits for it to dial through.

He lifts his arm back up immediately when Carly Rae Jepsen’s _ Call Me Maybe _ begins echoing tinnily from somewhere near the doorway. A truly pitiful groan floats dejectedly up from the floor on the side of the bed almost at the same time and Nate pushes up onto his elbow and leans carefully over. 

He finds himself scowling down at the reluctantly rousing form of one Ray Person.

Ray is sprawled on his back, limbs akimbo and hair sticking up in dark, awkward tufts with the missing duvet scrunched up underneath him like some kind of bizarre nest. His dignity is preserved only by the other half of the rumpled bedsheet, which is draped haphazardly across his thighs. There’s an utterly vicious string of small, circular bruises lining his throat from the hinge of his jaw to the lightly-fuzzed skin just a little way past his collarbone and a couple of hot red patches on his elbows and knees that might be rugburn or might be an allergy he’s currently refusing to acknowledge. You never know, with Ray.

_ Jesus Christ, _ Nate thinks, and is alarmed by the fondness in it. Out loud he croaks, “Person.”

Ray groans again, baring his teeth in a pained grimace and scrunching his eyes closed even tighter as he gropes for the sheet at his waist. When he finally manages to snag it, he hauls the whole thing up to cover his face, leaving his soft cock and pale, muscular thighs thoroughly and hilariously on display. If Nate weren’t entirely positive that Tisha would kill him for it if he ever got hacked, he would take a picture.

There’s another cluster of bruises near the blade of Ray’s hip on either side, curling around from the back, that look about the right shape and size for fingers. Nate is willing to put good money down that if he splayed his hand out over top of them, the marks would align perfectly.

“Person,” he says again, and this time he flings one of the pillows from the bed directly down into the general vicinity of Ray’s face.

Ray yelps and his whole body twitches, every muscle pulling taut for a long, furious second before he melts back into a puddle of misery and moans, “Fuck you,” from the mound of bed linens he’s half-buried under.

“Person, get up,” Nate tries, in an obviously hungover imitation of his very best unimpressed First Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick voice. 

Ray worms an arm out from under the sheet and promptly flips him off. He always was a disobedient little bastard. 

“Come on, Ray,” Nate sighs, dropping his cheek to the mattress and sticking an arm down to flail uselessly in the air a few inches above Ray’s supine form. He can’t reach any further from where he’s lying and he refuses to move again unless he absolutely has to. “Rise and shine, Corporal.” His voice is muffled and slurred against the mattress. “I need a debrief.”

Ray mumbles something that could be anything from a grade-school rejoinder about how Nate isn’t the boss of him to a truly withering slur against the virtue of Nate’s mother, sisters, and the entirety of his matrilineal ancestors. It’s difficult to tell through all the linen and cotton-batting.

Since Ray is being decidedly unhelpful, Nate endeavors to do at least a minimum amount of relatively immediate damage control and wiggles around until he can manage to peck out a response to Tisha’s text message.

_ Not dead, _ he writes, with a degree of ham-fisted difficulty that’s downright embarrassing for a man who graduated cum laude from a rigorous master’s program and has aspirations of helping to run an entire country sometime in the very near future. _ With Person. _

Tisha—who was first introduced to Ray when he rolled through the kitchen on a dog-drawn longboard clad in nothing but an American flag speedo with a box of wine cradled securely under each arm—will understand precisely the implications Nate is trying to make with that note, inconsequential though it may seem. He and Ray lie there for a few minutes, just listening to each other suck shallow, miserable breaths, and then Nate’s phone starts blaring less than two inches from his head. He whimpers and shies away from it while Ray laughs like an asshole from his own unenviable position sprawling naked on the floor of a strange hotel suite.

Nate cracks an eye to discover Tisha’s thoroughly unimpressed visage glowering out from the screen of his phone. He considers not answering for a split second, but an appreciation for just how easily Tisha could firebomb his entire career if she elected to do so has him swallowing around the fuzz coating his tongue and clumsily thumbing the answer bar at the bottom of the screen.

“This is Nate,” he says, with as much dignity as he can muster. It’s not a lot.

“Of course you’re with Person,” Tisha says frostily, in lieu of a greeting. “You’re _ always _ with Person when I wake up and read about you in an OpEd on The Hill. You remember when you assured me at the beginning of this campaign that you had him successfully domesticated?”

“I may have overestimated my animal handling skills in this particular instance,” Nate allows. Tisha snorts.

“At least you’re learning to equivocate like a politician,” she says approvingly. “Let me talk to your boytoy.”

Nate doesn’t bother looking before he announces, “Tisha wants to talk to you,” and drops the phone unceremoniously over the side of the bed. Ray grunts on impact and shuffles around a bit and Nate contents himself with sinking back down into the mattress and eavesdropping shamelessly. 

He can’t quite make out what Tisha is saying from here, her voice distorted down to a melodic hum that sounds a little bit like it’s stuck in a can, but he can hear Ray say, “‘sup Mama T?”

There’s a burble of agitated noise from Tisha’s end of the phone and then Ray intones breezily, “Is it really _ stealing _ a car if your gay lover’s name is on the title?”

That’s enough to stir Nate to real curiosity. He pushes up onto his arms and frowns down at Ray, who has kicked his way out from under all available cover and is laid out in a hungover rendition of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man with his eyes closed and the phone propped up against his cheek.

“Did you steal a car?” Nate demands. Ray waves a hand at him and hums in agreement with whatever Tisha is saying on the other line. 

“Nah,” Ray drawls a second later, the vowel sound long and low and confident. “You like me too much to let me sweat it out in county overnight with the crackheads and the perverts. Besides, it would look super bad for the Senator to have to arm-wrestle for my honor with a lifer named Rocko. I’d hate to see what losing my sweet ass would do to his poll standings. Anderson Cooper would shame him right out of the studio.”

“Hey,” Nate protests on his own behalf. Primarily because Ray and Tisha both know that he hates it when they call him the Senator—he hasn’t won the race yet and it feels like borrowing trouble to assume like that, even in jest—but also because Nate has taken good enough care of himself since leaving the service that he likes to think he could put up a solid showing in an arm-wrestling match. And besides, he and Anderson have an excellent rapport and Ray knows it. Nate might even go so far as to call them friends, or at least headed that way.

“So I slipped the LT a little tongue on Instagram,” Ray continues, completely ignoring Nate. “So what? Who gives a shit?”

Tisha talks for a while longer and this time, when Ray speaks, there’s a tone of actual frustration threaded thinly through his voice.

“No,” he says curtly. “Absolutely not.” He huffs a sigh through his nose as Tisha speaks and opens his eyes to glare balefully up at the ceiling. They’re red-rimmed and bloodshot beyond the inky depths and long lashes and Nate is honestly a little angry that he still finds them as attractive as ever. “Because,” Ray snaps, jerking a thumb at Nate even though Tisha can’t see it, “I don’t even apologize to sweet Nathaniel here unless he tricks me into it. If I ain’t bendin’ over for the guy who actually sticks his dick up my ass on the reg fat fuckin’ chance I’m doin’ it for that whiskey tango fuckloaf Ostenhauser.”

Ray chews on his lip for a second, reaching up to get a proper hold on the phone, and then snorts and rolls his eyes. “If you want to see something lewd you should check out that snap from the convention in Iowa where he’s basically humping his sixteen-year-old Russian mail-order bride in public. I uploaded that shit to Pornhub and it scored three-thousand views in like eight minutes.”

Tisha squawks and Nate winces, because that incident had been considered a huge scandal at the time and Nate’s campaign had spent a few weeks under major scrutiny by all parties as a result. It’s not really _ surprising _ that Ray is claiming involvement—he might be bluffing just to knock Tisha on her metaphorical ass, though Nate wouldn’t put it past him to pull such a thing off and get away with it besides—but it _ is _ ballsy, particularly considering the context of the conversation.

While Nate is watching, Ray reaches up to pinch at the bridge of his nose, grinding his teeth and pressing his mouth into a thin, flat line. 

“Whatever!” he sighs explosively. “It’s just a fucking picture, right? If we cater to the assholes _ now _ what’s it gonna be next time? We gonna get a Fox and Friends callout for holding hands? What if Nate pulls a chair out for me? You _ know _ that weird old gentleman shit gets him hot, Mama T! And I am absolutely not allowing cutbacks in the quality of my sex life just because one lumpy-assed fiscal Republican doesn’t like seeing dudes suck face on a personal Instagram account! He can fuckin’ unfollow me if it bothers him so much.” 

There’s a sharp, sudden chirp and Ray holds the phone away from his face for a second, frowning at the screen. He sighs again and shifts it back, continuing, “This piece of shit Samsung is about to die on me, Tish.”

“Lay off my phone,” Nate complains from the mattress. Ray lazily mimes jerking himself off in response.

“We’ll call you back, alright? Later. After my morning beej.” Ray says into the phone. “Yeah, Tish, you too.”

By the time Ray thumbs the damn thing off and drops it to the floor, pressing the heels of both hands into his eyes while he heaves a deep, slow breath, Nate has coaxed himself into sitting upright with both feet on the floor. He glances down at himself and sees, unsurprisingly, that he’s naked too. 

He usually is when he wakes up with Ray, though the serious beard-burn pinking his thighs is new and not entirely unwelcome. Still, Nate presses a hand to it and watches the red fade to white under the pressure of his palm. “Would it have killed you to shave, Person?”

Ray laughs softly from underneath his hands. He scrubs them over his face a few times and then lets his arms fall to his sides, a little of the tension sloughing off his shoulders as he settles back down against the duvet.

“You weren’t complaining when I was sucking your dick.”

Nate is overcome with a sudden, hazy memory of Ray’s short, dark hair clenched _tight_between his fingers while he ruts into the sloppy heat of Ray’s mouth, whining at the sandpaper grit of his two-day stubble.

“Yeah, well,” Nate says, heat flooding through his face. “Hindsight.”

“I’d like to sight your hind,” Ray agrees, wagging his eyebrows. Nate groans. “What do you say, Lieutenant? You gonna go ass-up for me if I promise to buy you breakfast after?”

“It’s ten-thirty,” Nate observes. Ray pushes himself up off the floor and rolls his eyes.

“Fine, brunch then,” he corrects. He gets up onto his knees, shuffling over to the edge of the bed and grinning when Nate parts his own to make room for him. “If I’d known you were gonna be so fuckin’ high maintenance about it I would have just waited to surprise you when you were back home.” He rests his hands over each of Nate’s thighs, glancing down and rubbing his thumbs in soft, soothing strokes against the abraded skin. “Damn, son, this is actually pretty hardcore.”

“You aren’t much better off,” Nate agrees, reaching out to press his thumb to the obnoxious hickey on Ray’s jaw and reveling in the little shiver that ripples through him. “What did we get up to last night, anyway?”

“Well," Ray grins at him, wide and delighted, “first I liberated you from that boring as fuck afterparty and then we came back here and got totally blasted on expensive booze on the taxpayer dime and after that you railed me so hard I don’t think I can stand up any more than I currently am.”

Another memory flickers forward—this one of Ray on all fours in front of him on the floor, babbling unintelligibly while Nate holds him so hard he knows it has to hurt, rutting into the tight, slick heat of his ass and marveling at the sheen of sweat and lube dripping in filthy rivulets down Ray’s flexing, quivering thighs.

Nate licks his lips and swallows thickly. “Okay,” he agrees hoarsely. “So. Then, what was Tisha all worked up about?”

Ray rolls his eyes again, but this time it’s without the smirk that means he’s joking. “That?” he huffs. “That was nothing.”

“Ray - ” Nate starts, but Ray cuts him off with a little shake of his head. He squeezes Nate’s thighs and Nate hisses, a wave of want licking hot up his spine.

“I’m serious,” Ray says. “It’s fuckin’ _ nothing _. I put a picture of us kissing in the elevator up on Insta and that Ostenhauser faggot got a sandcrab up his pussy about it.”

Nate flashes back again—to the heat of Ray’s body all alongside his own, elation rippling up through him in a bright geyser while Ray leans him back so far he nearly falls over, mouths moving together and hands seeking shamelessly and hearts pounding in time. He shifts a little against the mattress and Ray grins like he knows exactly what Nate is thinking about.

Nate bites back a laugh and trails his knuckles across Ray’s cheek, letting his thumb catch for a second against Ray’s lower lip. He sighs and shakes his head, admonishing, “We’re like the posterboys for gay America right now. You should really stop calling people faggots.”

“I’m not gonna do it on the air,” Ray assures, as if that should be obvious. He ducks his head down to press a kiss just above Nate’s knee. “Seriously, don’t worry about it, babe. I told Tisha that Ostenfucker could eat a dick, and so can the douchebags on The Hill that let him share his bullshit on their fuckin’ website. There was barely any tongue in the picture, anyway. I’ve seen worse from a fuckin’ Calvin Klein ad. You didn’t even have your stupid fuckin’ tie off yet.”

“Uh huh,” Nate says, not entirely convinced. He leans down, hands curled over the edge of the mattress, until he’s hovering a couple of inches away from Ray’s face. “What about the car?”

“Huh?” Ray jerks his gaze forcibly up from Nate’s mouth.

“The car you stole?” Nate presses, lifting his eyebrows expectantly. Ray blinks.

“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t actually steal anything, I just hotwired your limo.” Nate stares at him and Ray explains hurriedly, “Denny wouldn’t give me the keys because he thinks I’m a bad influence or what-the-fuck-ever, but not having the sexy car was going to throw a wrench in my big romantic surprise plans so I figured it’s better to ask forgiveness, right?”

Nate continues staring at him for a long, disbelieving second and then collapses forward until his forehead is pressed to Ray’s collarbone, his entire body shaking with laughter. Ray turns to press a kiss against his hair and rubs a hand up and down Nate’s back in a couple of sweeping strokes. 

“Jesus Christ, Ray,” Nate sighs. He means it for a reprimand but it’s too saturated with affection to land much of a blow. Ray shifts his hands to Nate’s waist, urging him closer to the edge of the bed with a careful tug that Nate follows willingly. “You’re lucky Tisha didn’t try and castrate you through the phone. You know she likes Denny best.”

“Psh,” Ray disagrees. _ “Denny? _ Please. She likes _ me _ best and that’s just science, boo.”

“Is it?”

“It is,” Ray insists. “I’m everyone’s favorite.”

“Oh yeah?” Nate asks, lifting his head. 

“Yeah,” Ray confirms. He tilts his chin up, nudging their noses pointedly together. “I know I’m _ your _favorite. So tell me, LT, what are you gonna do about it?”

Nate rolls his eyes and kisses him, just to shut him up.


End file.
